Chapter 10: Pantheism to Gravitational Fields Edited

Chapter 10: Panentheism, Spirit, Universal Christ, and Gravitational Fields

Panentheism, Bruce Sanguin’s Spirit, and Richard Rohr’s Universal Christ, also known as the Cosmic Christ, share the concept of something being within everything and everything being within that something. Panentheism believes God/Spirit is in everything and everything is in God/Spirit.

There is no perfect analogy for this concept, but gravitational fields might help understand this concept.

Every thing is held together in part by gravitational fields, though mostly by chemical bonds and electrical fields. Each particle in an atom has its own gravitational field. Each of us has our own gravitational field related to the distribution of mass in our body. We are held to the earth by the interaction between the earth’s gravitational field and our individual gravitational fields.

All gravitational fields contribute to a cumulative gravitational field. They are in everything and everything is in a gravitational field that we cannot see or touch directly, though we can feel it clearly all the time.

The same thing applies to electrical and magnetic fields.

The difference between these and a god present in everything and everything in god is that, as far as we know, these fields have no intelligence or self-awareness.

 

[Mendalla]

Each particle in an atom has its own gravitational field.

To be clear, though, it is not gravity that holds an atom together. Gravity is too weak on that scale. Electrons are held in orbit by electromagnetism, nuclei are held together by the strong nuclear force as are the quarks making up the protons and neutrons.

And gravity, as described by the General Theory of Relativity, is not really a field in the same way the other forces are but a distortion in space-time caused by mass. Which is the problem with creating a unified theory that ties together General Relativity and the Standard Model of Particle Physics (aka quantum theory). If gravity behaved like other forces (e.g. the two I mentioned in my first paragraph) and could be described using QFT (Quantum Field Theory), we would probably have that theory of everything by now. Gravity is the stubborn outlier that's messing with physicists' heads.

So I like the analogy for sure, but I think quantum fields work better than gravity here. They literally do make up and transcend everything whereas we still don't have a field theory for gravity that works (as explained above) and under General Relativity, our current best theory of gravity, gravity is a product of having mass, not a fundamental property itself.

Yes, I probably watch too much PBS Space Time (good show if you like this stuff but goes pretty far into the weeds compared to some other science YouTube channels).

 

[jimkenney12]

Thank you. I chose gravity because more people have some understanding of it than electromagnetism and using quantum fields would lose a lot of people. I will amend the chapter to clarify that it's not a field in scientific terms but a region of influence. I need to take some time to choose a good way of explaining.